"We need tools that can help people have their ideas faster"

Aditi Muralidharan on improving discovery and building intuition into search.

In the following video, Aditi Muralidharan (@silverasm), a Ph.D. student at UC-Berkeley, explains the core problem that catalyzes her research: We need tools that can help people have their ideas faster.

Toward that end, Muralidharan and her colleagues have developed WordSeer, a text analysis tool that examines and visualizes language use patterns.

Here’s how she describes the project:

WordSeer analyzes the grammatical structure of text. It makes it easier not only to ask the exact question that you meant to ask, but to get a sense for whether the results are representative and accurate — to kind of build intuition. We think that’s valuable. Tools like that should exist to help scientists and researchers do their jobs better.